Completely independent electrical control of spin and valley in a silicene field effect transistor

One-atom-thick silicene is a silicon-based hexagonal-lattice material with buckled structure, where an electron fuses multiple degrees of freedom including spin, sublattice pseudospin and valley. We here demonstrate that a valley-selective spin filter (VSSF) that supports single-valley and single-sp...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:Journal of physics. Condensed matter 2016-09, Vol.28 (35), p.355002-355002
Main Authors: Zhai, Xuechao, Jin, Guojun
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
field effect transistor
silicene
spin filter
Citations: Items that this one cites
Items that cite this one
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:One-atom-thick silicene is a silicon-based hexagonal-lattice material with buckled structure, where an electron fuses multiple degrees of freedom including spin, sublattice pseudospin and valley. We here demonstrate that a valley-selective spin filter (VSSF) that supports single-valley and single-spin transport can be realized in a silicene field effect transistor constructed of an npn junction, where an antiferromagnetic exchange field and a perpendicular electric field are applied in the p-doped region. The nontrivial VSSF property benefits from an electrically controllable state of spin-polarized single-valley Dirac cone. By reversing the electric field direction, the device can operate as a spin-reversed but valley-unreversed filter due to the dependence of band gap on spin and valley. Further, we find that all the possible spin-valley configurations of VSSF can be achieved just by tuning the electric field. Our findings pave the way to the realization of completely independent electrical control of spin and valley in silicene circuits.
ISSN:0953-8984
1361-648X
DOI:10.1088/0953-8984/28/35/355002